The Hypothetical Attention Pyramid Scheme

I loved the idea of Substack as a replacement for a few minutes, or maybe a few hours. I loved the notion of a writing community for people to share ideas, and written words. I lost passion when I saw that it was an attention pyramid scheme.

What is the Attention Pyramid Scheme

It’s an idea I came up with yesterday. It’s the notion that we create content on Substack, so that others notice us. We then follow others, and give them our attention in the hope that reciprocate it to us. The more time you invest, and the more you comment, and like, the more your own writing is visible.

In theory this is fantastic, because it’s “value for value” as some describe the concept. My concern is that after Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and every other social site, except for Flickr, selling out, I don’t want to invest my time, and creativity in a community that may eventually implode. Communities like Eyeem eventually imploded. They sold out and then it became yet another immoral VC project that I deleted my content from. They wanted to train AI on the images we had shared.

The Friendship Model

I prefer social networks that are based around personal connections and friendships rather than userships. I prefer when the atmosphere is convivial and friendly, where we interact and enjoy communicating enough to meet in person one day. I don’t get that feeling on Substack. It feels like non-marketers trying to market to non-marketers and failing. It feels like Linkedin, rather than genuine.

In a healthy social network people are social, sharing, ideas, trials, tribulations, amusing annecdotes, and not just putting their best foot forward.

WordPress.com

I could be tempted to move to WordPress.com, from self-hosting. My reason for doing this is that I think my blog may be more visible within the wordPress and Jetpack environments, but I refrain from doing this because wordpress.com is expensive, and limiting. With self-hosting I have full control. WordPress.com is expensive.

A Re-Written Substack Output

Instead of finding new ideas to write about for Substack I could re-write old blog posts. With added polish and editing mediocre blog posts could become well written substack posts, and the “premium” value could be that my posts are well written pieces, rather than thought experiments.